No NFL Team Has Ever Tried to Suck as Hard as the Dolphins Are
As I was looking at Dolphins team that just traded away the free safety their franchise spent last year’s 11th overall pick for, I was reminded of a trip I took to Alaska a few years back. I have a brother who lives in Juneau. And when he had to have brain surgery, needless to say my other brothers who live near me decided the wise thing to do would be to use that to our advantage. So we guilted our wives into letting us take a buddy trip to go visit him. (As a sidebar, as I started giving my spiel to the Irish Rose about how life is precious and how men in my family have died young and you don’t want to have regrets, she said “You’re about to ask me for a threesome, aren’t you?” Which I was. But how did she know? “Because I know your depravity. You can’t have the 3-way but you should go with your brothers to Alaska.” True story.) Anyway, we were taking a boat to a cabin by brother had use of, about two hour trip away. And as I was sitting on a cooler hanging on white-knuckled in the rough waters of the Alaskan coast he said to me, “If you go overboard in waters this cold, my advice is to just swim for the bottom blowing bubbles as you go. You’re gonna die anyway. It’ll be less painful that way.”
That is the 2019 Miami Dolphins. Swimming for the bottom blowing bubbles. Not fighting to save themselves. Just trying to die as quickly an painlessly as possible.
It’s the only explanation for trading Minkah Fitzpatrick when they did. I have no issue with the return necessarily. Once Ben Roethlisberger went down for the count that Steelers 1st round pick instantly became a likely Top 10. Which is where you need to be drafting in order to get a solid, dependable, impact player with a high ceiling. A player like … Minkah Fitzpatrick. A guy that Nick Saban called “The best leader I’ve ever coached.”
But a player who saw through Miami’s transparent bullshit and dysfunction and didn’t want to waste the years of his rookie contract in a perpetual rebuild. And so bad are the Dolphins that they couldn’t placate him by showing him the building plans for making it better.
This is the defense that just jettisoned the pod on their franchise defensive back:
–An unbelievable Completion % Against of 79.6
–A league worst Touchdown % Against of 14.8%
–A league worst (by far) Average Yards per Attempt of 14.9 yards
–An almost perfect Passer Rating Against of 155.9
–2018 Lamar Jackson had 6 passing TDs in 7 games with a Passer Rating of 84.5. Against Miami he was 17-20 with 324 yards, 5 TDs, 0 INTs and a perfect PR of 158.3.
In other words, statistically speaking the Dolphins are doing slightly better at pass defense than if they didn’t put any players on the field.
Pick any stat and they have lapped the field with their awfulness. They’ve lost two games by an average score of 56-5. The second worst teams in Point Differential right now are the Steelers and Giants, at -32. The Dolphins are -92. At this current pace they’ll be outscored by 736 points on the season. I could go on, but it’s like sifting through a crime scene. And I don’t feel like shining any more blacklight on this blood- and jizz-covered hotel bedspread.
Say what you will about the 0-16 Browns of 2017. At least they were a little bit competitive. They lost by a field goal to Pittsburgh and the Jets and took Green Bay to overtime. And their defense was only second worst in the league. Miami is under no delusion they could achieve so lofty a goal now.
Hell, the 2011 Colts didn’t even try to hide the Suck for Luck campaign. The minute Peyton Manning went overseas to get secret treatments in the EU that are not approved by the FDA but were most definitely not HGH because he says so, the Colts went with a three-headed Cerberus of Curtis Painter, Dan Orlovsky and Kerry Collins, the NFL’s sweatshops in China started printing Luck’s Colts jersey. And yet even that team had enough pride to finish 28th in both offense and defense. If the 2019 Dolphins faced the 2011 Colts on a neutral site, the Colts would be giving 13.5 points. And I’m talking about today. When guys like Collins are in their mid-40s.
It’s hard not to have a little human sympathy for the guys who are collateral damage in this. Brian Flores, who knows enough about coaching to have held the historically good 2018 Rams to a field goal and zero trips to the red zone. But who inexplicably took this job. And Fitzpatrick, who wanted out of an 0-2 team with no quarterback that is going nowhere to … an 0-2 team with no quarterback that is going nowhere. And ironically, now doesn’t even have a 1st Round pick.
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You hate to see it from a once-proud franchise. Just hate to see it. It’s worse than the thought of me in as an orgy guy.